Coffee Tree

Well, coffee trees may not seem too weird, but they are certainly wonderful. You’ll almost certainly need a warm greenhouse or conservatory unless you’re in the Scilly Isle, but growing a coffee tree is well worth the effort.

To begin with, coffee bushes are evergreen and that makes them an ideal specimen for year round interest. Although they can grow to twenty-three feet tall and ten feet across, they are also easy to keep to six feet high and four across, which is about the right size if you decide to actually try and roast your own coffee beans! The flowers are Jasmine scented and small white starry blossoms that cluster along the stems of the coffee plant, giving lovely spring colour and leading, if you’re lucky, to coffee berries! These emerge later and aren’t coffee coloured but range from a beige colour on first appearance through to a kind of shrivelled black which then has to be peeled open to extract the coffee beans themselves. Sadly you’ll never get enough coffee to make a can of grounds, but you can roast the beans once you’ve fermented and dried them, and when they are a ripe mahogany colour you can grind them, pour boiling water on them and use the coffee extract in puddings.

A coffee tree will live for around 25 years given moist soil and light shade, and hard pruning! They can be inclined to pick up bugs and pests but a spray with soapy water will normally resolve such infestations.

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